Step One: Audition for the Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler.
Step Two: Convince one of your best friends to be in it with you.
Step Three: Meet with the director to talk about the set. She showed me the following picture from a church she had visited:

Step Five: Despite having to teach, design costumes for another performance, apply to schools, and being generally overwhelmed, agree to create a series of panels for the backdrop. I was inspired by Georgia O'Keefe images, cathedral stained glass, and the idea of using women's work (quilting and applique) for a play about women's voices and experiences. So along with Liz, the director, we visited some fabric stores an
Step Six: Liz had told me to remember that the play (and thus the image) should speak to the beauty and the pain of female experiences with sexuality. So my goal was not to create something too soft or too pretty-- there would be sharpness and bitterness as well. I thought about breaking a mirror and sewing the shards on the fabric--I still like that idea--but due to time constraints I ended up using beads to create jagged edges within the folds.
Step Seven: The final look was always a mystery to me, because I didn't have a flat surface
Step Eight: As I was adding pieces to it, I kept thinking about the language of the play--there are so many references to fish, water, and slippery rocks ("my vagina--a wide wet water village," so I used some gold fabric with red koi on it to break up the red. I also kept thinking ab
Step Nine: Hang up the two panels in back of a play. When I finally saw them together hanging up and spaced apart, I couldn't get over how much the central image looked like a map of the United States. I liked the idea of The United State
Step Ten: Use the panels in my bedroom and living room as curtains.
THE END